Legacies of the Great War

It is another Armistice Day, Veterans Day in the USA, and as a World War I historian I always think about the many veterans I interviewed from the Great War as a student at the University of Utah. The topics included aviation, the Spanish Flu epidemic and the routine duty of life as a soldier. My area of specialty was interned civilians and I spoke to many who knew of their suffering. The Great War was later overshadowed by the larger effort in World War II and was largely forgotten. So many of the conflicts we see today arose during World War I. Consider the formation of Iraq, created in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

The lessons of the first war are also forgotten but the legacies of that war were carried on over 70 years later. When Yugoslavia was in turmoil and Croatia and Serbia were fighting I was in Zagreb and examined some of the hardware being used by the Croatian army. Arms and uniforms from Hungary and Austria were present. Serbia was being backed by Russia, their traditional protector. The alliances of World War I reappeared in the Balkans, or they never really disappeared. Germany recognized Croatia as an independent state very early triggering a number of unintended events. The parallels were eerily similar to those in 1914. Where were the lessons learned? I would like that question answered by someone. I think the residents of Srebrenica in July 1995 are crying out for those questions to be answered.

The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were granted independence after World War I. They were absorbed into the USSR in 1940 but in 1990 Lithuania stood alone against Soviet tanks. As I climbed around the blocks put in front of the Seimas in Vilnius to defend against the tanks I was amazed that this state was standing so bravely in the cause of liberty. It was an inspiring sight. One needed only go to the television tower to be reminded that the price of liberty was not cheap.

My wife and I were in Austria and when we came upon the casket of Zita, the last hereditary heir to the Hapsburg throne, and wondered why the flowers and adulation. The resurgence of the possibility of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, even in a trade zone, lingered. I saw the same reverence toward the Czar Nicholas II while in Moscow in 1990. I would have thought the war was over but the death of the empires was still mourned by generations who knew nothing of Good Soldier Svejk or the carnage of the eastern front.

A small delegation to the peace talks in France in 1919 requested independence for French Indo-China. Unfortunately that was denied and the end result was over 50,000 American dead in Vietnam. My father fought in that war, a war that could have been avoided as part of the peace process ending that war.

I visited a small town in Nebraska that was settled by Germans in the early 1900s. It was a prosperous town and on the old buildings you could see evidence of the prosperity from years ago. This town was also the scene of some cultural cleansing - prohibiting the German language from being used in the churches and schools. German books were burned in the square by some nearby "patriots." So many of these incidents were fogotten over time. Pride in being German was wiped clean in the spring of 1918. Many ethnic groups preserved some part of their heritage but Germans erased their links to the old country in a very short burst of nativist sentiment in 1918.

Do we really know about the legacies of the Great War?